1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a mobile communication system, and in particular, to a method for changing a subscription status of a service in a mobile communication system, and a system thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Now, the mobile communication market faces the continuous demand for production of new services through recombination and/or integration of the existing technologies. Today, with the development of communication and broadcasting technologies, the conventional broadcasting system or mobile communication system has reached the phase of providing various services such as broadcast services through a terminal such as mobile phone and Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
Convergence of mobile communication services and Internet Protocol (IP) technology is now the mainstream in developing the next-generation mobile communication technology due to the market needs, the increasing user demands for multimedia services, the providers' policies to provide new services such as broadcast service in addition to the existing voice services, and the interests of Information Telecommunication (IT) enterprises which are strengthening their mobile communication business in acceptance of the user demands. This has come to introduce and apply various wireless or broadcasting services not only in the mobile communication market but also in the wired communication market, and such omnidirectional convergence has made the same consumption environment for various services regardless of the wire or wireless broadcasting.
Meanwhile, Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a group of studying the standard for interaction between individual mobile solutions, mainly takes charge of establishing various application standards for mobile games, Internet services, etc. In particular, OMA Mobile Broadcast Working Group (BCAST), one of OMA working groups, is studying the technical standard that provides broadcast services using terminals. OMA BCAST standardizes technology for providing IP-based broadcast services in the portable terminal environment, such as service guide, download and streaming delivery technology, service and content protection technology, service subscription, roaming, etc.
In mobile broadcast, provisioning of subscription/termination, update, purchase/subscription information for the service that the service provider provides, is managed by a service provisioning function block. Regarding service provisioning, OMA BCAST has functions of price information request, service subscription, service termination, encryption key update, token purchase and account information provisioning, and a network entity, called Broadcast Subscription Management (BSM) block, manages and provides information related to the service provisioning.
Along with the market flow of providing integrated services due to the above-stated convergence of wire/wireless environments, the mobile broadcast technology such as OMA BCAST will also evolve into a business model so as to provide services in the wire/wireless integrated environment beyond the mobile environment.
However, in the conventional mobile communication system, only price information and account information requests in addition to subscription, purchase, and update for subscription status are defined for a subscription/purchase-related service in the broadcast service as in the above-stated OMA BCAST. Therefore, when a user, who has subscribed to a service, enjoys the service on a fixed charge basis, or enjoys the service by purchasing a particular content such as movie when needed, the user should always pay a fixed amount of money regardless of whether or not he/she has enjoyed the service for the corresponding period. In addition, when a user leaves the service area for a long period, the user should pay the unnecessary expenses even though he/she cannot physically enjoy the service.
Therefore, there is a need for a scheme capable of changing (pausing a subscription status or resuming the paused subscription status) a subscription status of the user who subscribed to a service in a mobile communication system.